John,
Let me remind our readers here of a few past comments.
I don't find any of these statements by Gordon "far from reasonable".
In fact they are perfect echos of the things we post here at ASR daily.
"
We've lost our direction....The High End in 1992 is a multi-million-dollar business. But it's an empty triumph, because
we haven't accomplished what we set out to do. The playback
still doesn't sound 'just like the real thing.'
People, let's start getting back to basics. Let's put the 're' back into 'reproduction.' Let's promote products that dare to sound as 'alive' and 'aggressive' as the music they are trying to reproduce."
JGH
Do you still feel the high-end audio industry has lost its way in the manner you described 15 years ago?
John Atkinson
"Not in the same manner; there's no hope now.
Audio actually used to have a goal: perfect reproduction of the sound of real music performed in a real space. That was found difficult to achieve, and it was abandoned when most music lovers, who almost never heard anything except amplified music anyway, forgot what "the real thing" had sounded like.
Today, "good" sound is whatever one likes. As Art Dudley so succinctly said [in his January 2004 "Listening," see "Letters," p.9], fidelity is irrelevant to music.
Since the only measure of sound quality is that the listener likes it, that has pretty well put an end to audio advancement, because different people rarely agree about sound quality. Abandoning the acoustical-instrument standard, and the mindless acceptance of voodoo science, were
not parts of my original vision."
JGH
Do you see any signs of future vitality in high-end audio?
John Atkinson
"Vitality? Don't make me laugh.
Audio as a hobby is dying, largely by its own hand. As far as the real world is concerned, high-end audio lost its credibility during the 1980s, when it flatly refused to submit to the kind of basic honesty controls (double-blind testing, for example) that had legitimized every other serious scientific endeavor since Pascal. [This refusal] is a source of endless derisive amusement among rational people and of perpetual embarrassment for me, because I am associated by so many people with the mess my disciples made of spreading my gospel. "
JGH
It was 45 years ago this month that the first issue of Stereophile, just 20 pages in length, went in the mail. It had been founded by one J. Gordon Holt. Gordon had been technical editor of High Fidelity magazine in the 1950s, and was tired of being asked to pander to the demands of advertisers.
www.stereophile.com
Next John, a bit of your own postings,
"At the end of November, I had first-hand experience of this question. At the invitation of audio researcher
James D. Johnston ("JJ" to denizens of the Internet newsgroups),
(Our very own distinguished member here) I spent a very enjoyable morning at AT&T's Shannon Laboratory in New Jersey, listening to the surround recording/playback system JJ has been involved in developing (footnote 1). Using an array of seven directional microphones to sample the original live soundfield at one point in space gives a five-channel recording that, when played back with five speakers correctly positioned, does an astonishingly impressive job of superimposing that original space on the listening-room acoustic.
I found the experience equally convincing, whether the surround recording was of a string trio, an orchestra, a pipe organ, or a rock band playing live in what sounded like an aircraft hangar. In fact, it was even convincing
without any music being played at all. The sounds of organ blower noise, audience coughs and rustles, AC noise—all the live clues that enable your brain to identify the space in which you find yourself and adapt your hearing accordingly—were sufficient to immerse me in the recorded acoustic. I also found the sweet spot more expansive than in a typical two-channel situation; in particular, as I moved away from the prime seat, the perceived acoustic perspective changed much as it would have done in real life. In addition, the sense of perceived space either side of me was better defined than I have experienced from conventional surround recordings.
I drove back to Brooklyn deep in thought. There was no doubt that I had experienced audio playback of considerably higher fidelity than I had ever experienced from a two-channel system."
Stereophile February 2001, Vol.24 No.2 / "As We See It"By John Atkinson Jonathan Scull told me there'd be trouble when I decided to put the Denon AVR-4800 surround receiver on our December cover. As you can see from this issue's "Letters," he was right. Although reader Bob Laurie and retailer...
www.stereophile.com
Now rather than continue to drag out past remarks and comments I can only ask (as Gordon did so many years ago.)
Will Stereophile and the rest of the "high end media" ever drag their butts out of that ditch you drag those rocks through, and once again start addressing ways to actually improve the reproduction of music in the home?
That's why I got into this passion sometime around 60 years ago.
